Comment by noduerme

I'm personally not comfortable with the widespread argument (not yours) that moving from a shit-on-shit scripting language to using an LLM to write code is just a matter of degree or just one more layer of abstraction. I think writing code with an LLM severs the logic chain you may have to follow - and hopefully can follow - to get back to the basic principles and root causes you need to understanding what your code is doing.

But the lazy (and wrong) belief by people not committed to exacting standards in their engineering, that AI is just another layer of abstraction or another scripting language, actually obscures a much more unpleasant fact: Performance, as far as the managerial class was concerned, was never about getting the best performance. It was always about whatever was just enough.

We as coders used to prioritize performance because hardware was so limited and we wanted to squeeze the most out of every cycle, every 1Kb of RAM. For some of us, that habit will never die, because we look at a new piece of hardware and realize how much more we can make it do.

But pre-AI slop of backends with huge supply chains and Electron as a frontend arose because memory and compute had become so cheap that acceptable performance required less and less optimization.

That doesn't mean that some of us didn't maintain a niche in making things optimized, but for the past twenty years or so there's been a whole generation of engineers whose priority has been speed of development. And from the perspective of a company that treats engineers as disposable cogs and prioritizes frameworks and assumes Moore's Law, why not?

AI just takes that to the next level. Take the entire chain of existing React slop and create a Markov chain to regirgitate parts of it on cue. And let's be honest: 95% of companies don't need to forge anything particularly new, they just need to cobble existing parts together.

I thought it about 15 years ago talking to CRUD coders who hated their jobs: You're in the wrong business if you're not getting joy out of creating and solving new problems. So in a way, AI just gives everyone who only wanted shitty software the shitty software they deserve? I don't know. I haven't finished thinking about it.